Galileo: Full Bibliography

Recommended Reading

Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, Chicago 1978

Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, translated by A. van Helden, Chicago 1989

Peter Machamer (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge 1998

James Reston Jr, Galileo: A life, New York 1994

Other Texts

Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr, 'Galileo, Florentine "Disegno" and the "Strange Spottednesse" of the Moon,' Art Journal 44 (1984), 225-232 investigates the role of training in art in order to interpret visual evidence.

Rivka Feldhay, 'Producing sunspots on an iron pan: GalileoÍs scientific discourse,' in H. Krips (ed.), Science, Reason and Rhetoric, Pittsburgh 1995, 119-43 investigates Galileo's rhetorical strategies of defending interpretation of visual evidence.

Owen Gingerich, 'The Galileo Affair', The Great Copernicus Chase and other adventures in astronomical history, Cambridge 1992, ch. 14, a popular, but helpful introduction to this topic.

Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540-1605, Princeton 1977

Albert van Helden, 'The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century', Peter Dear (ed.) The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe, Chicago 1997. Isis 65 (1974).

Richard S. Westfall, 'Science and patronage: Galileo and the Telescope,' in Peter Dear (ed.) The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe, Chicago 1997, also published in Isis 76 (1985)

Mary G. Winkler, and Albert van Helden, 'Representing the Heavens: Galileo and Visual Astronomy', Isis 83 (1992), 195-217, for the implications of representing telescopic observations.

For more advanced reading, see Richard S. Westfall, Essays on the Trial of Galileo, Vatican 1989

Further helpful orientation and bibliography can be found in in Ernan McMullin, 'Galileo on Science and Scripture', Richard Blackwell, 'Could there be another Galileo case?' and Marcello Pera, 'The god of theologians and the god of astronomers: An apology of Bellarmine', all in Peter Machamer (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge 1998. An important background to the affair was the struggle for hegemony between the Dominicans and the Jesuits, for which, see Rivkha Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: political inquisition or critical dialogue? Cambridge 1995.